Increasing and Measuring Impact - PPT

About Journal Impact

Impact Factor - What is it?; Why use it?

The impact factor (IF) is a measure of the frequency with which the average article in a journal has been cited in a particular year. It is used to measure the importance or rank of a journal by calculating the times it's articles are cited.

How Impact Factor is Calculated?

The calculation is based on a two-year period and involves dividing the number of times articles were cited by the number of articles that are citable.

Calculation of 2010 IF of a journal:

A = the number of times articles published in 2008 and 2009 were cited by indexed journals during 2010.

About Citation Analysis

Citation Analysis - What is it?

The process whereby the impact or "quality" of an article is assessed by counting the number of times other authors mention it in their work.

Citation analysis invovles counting the number of times an article is cited by other works to measure the impact of a publicaton or author. The caviat however, there is no single citation analysis tools that collects all publications and their cited references. For a thorough analysis of the impact of an author or a publication, one needs to look in multiple databases to find all possible cited references. A number of resources are available at UIC that identify cited works including: Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar, and other databases with limited citation data.

Citation Analysis - Why use it?

To find out how much impact a particular article or author has had, by showing which other authors cited the work within their own papers. The H-Index is one specific method utilizing citation analysis to determine an individuals impact.

About the H-index

The h-index is an index to quantify an individual’s scientific research output. J.E. Hirsch - http://www.pnas.org/content/102/46/16569The h-index is an index that attempts to measure both the scientific productivity and the apparent scientific impact of a scientist. The index is based on the set of the researcher's most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other people's publications (Wikipedia) A scientist has index h if h of [his/her] Np papers have at least h citations each, and the other (Np − h) papers have at most h citations each.